Got another new GBA dump today (thanks Azathoth for the cart!) but don't get too excited, it's no Digimon Sapphire. It's something I saw in Turkey many, many years ago, read somewhere that it's "like a weird Space Invaders clone" and never found again. Until now! presenting:
Star Wars 3
A very simple GBA game. With nothing to do with Star Wars. It may well be a homebrew game that some pirates released on cart, but I don't recognise it - anyone? The ROM dumped as 32mb but I got it down to a gigantic 8kb - anyway give it a try:
download! Star Wars 3 (Unl).zip (4.13kb)
could it be? another new dump? :O yes! and, I believe, the first playable dumped GBA pirate original ever ever. so take that, internet!
it's a platformer, it's by Vast Fame, it's based on Digimon and it's awesome. it is of course:
Digimon Sapphire!
those of you who have seen my youtube channel may well be aware that I've had its counterpart (well I say "counterpart", it's not even the same genre) Digimon Rury/Ruby for a while and I've never been able to dump it, but I bought this one recently from Volumerates and amazingly it dumped and was playable the first damn time! So I'm guessing either this was a reprint without protection or Sapphire just isn't as well protected as Ruby was.
Anyway I like this game a lot. Like, I think it's genuinely good, not just "good for a pirate" or what have you. It's a Digimon based platformer with three selectable characters, all of which can turn into some big dude if you press the R button (can you tell I don't know Digimon) and there are bosses with engrish dialogue and all sorts. The sprites apparently are ripped from Digimon Battle Spirits but hey. And Vast Fame's music is awesome as usual, even if they are only using the GBC sound hardware for this one.
Now this rom does have certain ... issues, mainly that while the actual game data is only 4mb big, the ROM itself is 32mb. The rest of the ROM is filled with 4mb blocks of either the game repeated, all 00s or a pattern of bytes, I've been tinkering with it for a while and it seems to be laid out like this:
1. Game
2. some repeating pattern of bytes
3. Game (duplicate of 1)
4. Pattern again
5. Pattern
6. 00's
7. Pattern
8. 00's
blocks 2-4 and 6-8 don't matter but the pattern at 5 has to be present, I'm assuming for some failed copy protection routine, and it has to be in the right place (1000000h), so all you can do is trim off blocks 6-8 - the last 12mb - leaving it at 20mb which is kinda an odd size for a GBA game. So, fuck it, I'll just release the whole 32mb dump as is, at least it's playable. It compresses down to under 2mb anyway so size is only really a problem if you're playing it on a flashcart. And hey, maybe someone out there can figure out a solution to get it running in its correct size.
download! Digimon Sapphire (Unl) [p1].rar (1.93mb)
Update 7 Aug 2011 - This version of the game seems to be a bit different to the original, the credits are missing and on the real cart it crashes after every level (though not in emulators) so i'm going to label it as a [p1] (ie a modified pirate copy, since that apparently is what it is)
In other dumping related news cah4e3 has dumped a couple more of my Famicom carts namely Waixing's port of Zelda: Link to the Past and this 12 in 1. You might also want to check out the PGC Forums if you aren't already a member there, a whole bunch of new MD and SNES games have been posted recently. or if you aren't interested in that you should check it out anyway!
i recently took delivery of four undumped, unlicensed gameboy color games, along with something to - in theory - dump them; three of them either didn't dump properly or have some kind of copy protection. (i suspect the latter; i know certain other unlicensed gbc games had to be cracked, which is a bit of a pain in the arse. if you can help with this, please contact me!)
but one - a 12 in 1 multicart - at least yielded a working copy of its first game. which is something! so i hereby present my first rom release:
SHI KONG XING SHOU (時空星獸)
approximately translated, "space-time star beast". also known as 星空神獸, for some reason. also, the multicart menu calls it "spatio monoster", while in the header it's "timer monster", but i doubt it ever had an official english name. it was originally released in 2001 for the game boy color by v.fame of taiwan, generally considered (at least by me, and the two or so other people who consider such things) the best unlicensed developer on the system.
it's an RPG, very similar to pokemon, but somehow spacier. i think the monsters appear after a meteor storm, but maybe they were there all along. hey i don't know! it's in chinese. but it seems pretty cool. and if you've played pokemon it shouldn't be too hard to figure out the gameplay, because it's, y'know, the same. there are a few variations on the concept - you apparently join up with seven other people, each with their own monster with some kind of special skill, but I haven't played very far yet so I'm not sure how (if at all) this ties into the usual six-monster team setup the game employs.
there seems to be a glitch with the "pokedex" (which, by the way, has space for 152 monsters, one more than the original pokemon games. take that, nintendo!) which i can't reproduce on the original cart: after saving in the second town, it fills up with a seemingly random bunch of monsters you haven't actually caught. so i'm not sure if this is an emulation problem, or it's a bad dump. i suspect the former, because it doesn't seem to happen in no$gmb, but if it's the latter, i apologise! i'm also labelling this as a multicart rip because it may or may not be identical to the single cart version (i think the menu code might be buried in it somewhere); hopefully someone will be able to dump that too at some point, and we'll have a "proper" version.
download! Shi Kong Xing Shou (Multicart Rip) (Unl) [C].zip (714k)
(btw, I've made a couple of changes to the site's CSS to accommodate this update, if this has broken it in your browser let me know)